Ben put on a great gig playing his Weezer-inspired geek rock to a willing audience in a perfect venue for such a performance. Most punters left with smiles after hearing some gems from Ben's earlier career and a fair chunk from his latest release. Highlight of the night for me was Penny on a train track, which had the crowd singing along. The only disappointment was that he didn't play Wasted and ready, which I was looking forward to.Justin Ressler, Gymea

Delivering a tight set featuring all of their hits, Linkin Park knew exactly
how to enthral the crowd and did so with ease. Throughout the show
Chester's scream remained piercing and the musicianship stellar. Bright
lights and stage antics enhanced the passion with which they played.
The obvious favourites included Numb, which got everyone out of their seats,
and In The End, which had an audience-led chorus. The truly beautiful acoustic
version of Pushing Me Away induced tears. It was a heartfelt and
long-awaited concert that delivered everything I expected and more.Sevana O, Bossley Park

This epic concert from Darren Hayes's The Time Machine Tour blew me away. Performing songs from his new, highly personal album This Delicate Thing We've Made, Hayes journeyed from exuberant pop to raw ballads via 80s synth-infused disco. The ingenious incorporation of high-tech projections and spectacular laser lighting made time travel seem momentarily possible with surprises at every turn. If this is the way to time travel and if self-reflection brings such joy, then count me in. Especially if Darren Hayes is involved. Alpha Au, Beecroft

As much as I admire Ed Kuepper's song writing and guitar playing I found this performance uninspiring. Playing with an ensemble of musicians, including a horns section that did admittedly impress on the opening Saints-inspired song, I found the show good but not up to my high expectations - I just didn't feel the magic. Then again, in all fairness Ed Kuepper has had many different stages in his career and I prefer his earlier acoustic songs over the electric tunes that he played. Carl Thomas, Enmore

This fascinating film dramatises the turbulent life of Ian Curtis and his 70s band Joy Division. It's a powerful portrait of a tormented soul, whose struggles with epilepsy and his personal demons eventually destroys him. Although this tale is tragic it's also ultimately uplifting. Polished performances, stark black and white photography and great music make Control compulsive viewing for all serious cinephiles.Anna Spencer, Roseville

Garry Maddox was, admittedly, a little tricky and picked The Lord of the Rings trilogy as his favourite - not something it was possible to vote for via our multiple choice questionnaire.
But you did vote for all three as best in their year.

What other films did you vote for and where else did you intersect? Click through to find out.

The best movies of the last 25 years - Metro reader's winners

1982 Bladerunner
1983 Return of the Jedi
1984 Ghostbusters
1985 Back to the Future
1986 Aliens
1987 The Princess Bride
1988 Rain Man
1989 Dead Poet's Society
1990 Goodfellas
1991 The Silence of the Lambs
1992 A Few Good Men
1993 Jurassic Park
1994 Pulp Fiction
1995 The Shawshank Redemption
1996 Trainspotting
1997 The Castle
1998 Saving Private Ryan
1999 The Matrix
2000 Gladiator
2001 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2002 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
2005 Million Dollar Baby
2006 The Departed

Top ten movies by total votes

Return of the Jedi 5661Dead Poet's Society 5216The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 4708Back to the Future 4591The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 4459The Matrix 4236Bladerunner 4130Rain Man 4096
Ghostbusters 4028A Few Good Men 4021

This has a stellar line up on stage, including Colleen Hewett, Mark Holden, Glenn Shorrock, John Paul Young and Tim Campbell as Johnny O'Keefe. They sang a medley of Johnny's hits and boy were they a hit with the audience, my favourite being Ms Hewett singing She wears my ring. You could travel the world and not find better or brighter talent, and judging by the reaction of the crowd Shout! will be a hit next year at Star City (it'll play in the Lyric theatre from March 4). Best of luck to all involved and hopefully a successful run next year. Ross Powell, Bella Vista

This three-piece blues band blew me away. The experienced musicians plied their craft skilfully, and their use of slide guitar, harmonica and powerful drumming (courtesy of Midnight Oil's Rob Hirst) made me enjoy the blues more than I'd ever had before. It was a great show and I recommend seeing them if you get the chance. J.G, Inner West

In short, I loved it. The set design was 70s fab and beautifully done, and as for the acting: well, after three wines I was still awake, so that has to be a good sign. In fact, by the end I was ready to join Don's messy party myself.Tania Simanowsky, Bondi

Enjoyable enough film, maybe a little predictable, but that added to the fun. A little slow to start but once it got moving it was full on. During its one and a half hours there were good performances and enough comedy to satisfy.Ross Powell, Bella Vista

Having been a fan of Abby Dobson since her days with Leonardo's Bride, I can honestly say after seeing her perform that she is a true artist. Not only did she capture everyone in the venue with her soaring vocals and intelligent guitar playing but her new band was the perfect accompaniment. The material from her just released album sent chills right through me. But it was her solo rendition of her classic hit Even When I'm Sleeping that threw everyone into a frenzy. It was truly an awesome show. Welcome back, Abby!Steven Goetz, Woollahra

Starring Hugo Weaving and Susie Porter, this is a play about members of a former rock band getting together to see which is less appealing: going back on the road with people you loathe or shutting yourself away from the world and allowing your neuroses to consume you. The dialogue doesn't seem realistic, but to accuse Andrew Upton of writing stagy dialogue is a serious charge, and there are some funny lines in the mix. Riflemind is repetitive in parts, and its general flatness is not helped by being on a single set. Maybe they couldn't afford set changes with all the money spent on the cast and celebrity director (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Jonathan Empson, Balmain

This is a great production, with a colourful set circa 1969 (red walls, settee, parker dining suite, coloured canisters like the ones I just bought on Ebay). There's a large cast, with nine actors strategically placed on stage for most of the play while various spotlights focus on what's happening at any one time. Drunkenness and debauchery follow an election night party in 1969 where Don's friends rally to watch election results, drink copious amounts of beer and moselle and then proceed to mock, bitch and complain about their shocking lives. Great script and a must see!Maggie Staines, Oatley

Attending the opening night of the Jazz:Now Festival, I was astounded by the performance of the Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra. This group were not only innovative but also damn hot and exciting! Definitely an entertaining pleasure to seek out!Ross Ogden, Surry Hills

Historian Jill Roe chaired the editorial board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography from 1996 to 2006, which well qualifies her to give a lecture on "Biography and the Struggle for the Soul of Australia".

"The ADB is a marvellous resource to enable us to see what Australian people are really like - a form of group biography," she says. "I'm talking about the tradition of the bush intellectual, of which Miles Franklin was one. It shows the great richness of the Australian soul."

Two weeks ago Professor Emerita Roe received her "gong" as an Officer of the Order of Australia from the NSW Governor, Marie Bashir. In April HarperCollins will publish her long-awaited biography, Stella Miles Franklin. "I started it long, long ago with an entry in the ADB. She has been in my life for three decades," says Roe.

As a crossover book - scholarship written for a general audience - it needed rigorous editing and Roe was uncovering new material until the last possible moment. Having given her Humanities Research Centre Seymour Lecture on biography in Canberra and Melbourne, she will repeat it at Sydney's National Maritime Museum at 6pm on Wednesday. Entry is free.

Mr Darcy lovers will have to fly to Melbourne for the International Jane Austen Conference at La Trobe University on November 29-30.

Germaine Greer's opening night lecture on "Jane Austen and the Getting of Wisdom" will look at the undervalued genre of the female Bildungsroman - growing-up novels such as Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom and most of Austen.

The conference's main theme, says its organiser, Laura Carroll, on sarsaparillablog.net is "Austen as a comic writer and ... what happens to Austen's comedy when her work is translated into other languages and read in cultures quite distant from the one she wrote her novels in."

Almost 30 scholars will speak, including Linda Bree of Cambridge University Press, whose plenary address will look at Austen's growing popularity in the 21st century. Cambridge recently published a new edition of Austen's complete works. See austen2007.net.

The ever-inventive Johanna Featherstone of the Red Room Company has created an "audio time capsule" containing new poems, personal objects and statements about the state of poetry and language from eight poets.

The capsule is digitally archived and will be released in October 2030. The poets, including Jane Gibian, Ed Wright, Bravo Child and Romaine Moreton, also worked with primary school students to co-write poems about the future of Sydney, which the City of Sydney is projecting onto the AMP Building as part of the Art & About festival this month. See interviews and readings of the projected poems at redroomcompany.org.

A NEW YORKER article by Adam Gopnik sent me on a pilgrimage in 1994 to the Glass House in Paris, an architectural oddity that was built in 1931 and lights up at night like a Japanese lantern. Although I could only peep through the gate at the banal daytime glass box, Gopnik lived for a while in its translucent, impractical rooms and his fascination rubbed off on me. In my memory the house has a magical glow.

By some ill-judged editorial decision, The Ghost of the Glass House was cut from Paris to the Moon, Gopnik's 2000 collection of Paris essays. He has hinted he will expand the piece to book length and I hope he does. However, he has been an original and often exciting writer with The New Yorker for two decades, so there's plenty to enjoy in both the Paris book and this New York collection, Through the Children's Gate.

Gopnik first visited New York from Philadelphia as a child in 1959 and "ate dinner at a restaurant that served a thrilling, exotic mix of blintzes and insults ..". He first lived there in a basement room with his wife, Martha. After five years in Paris, they moved back to a cleaned-up, wealthier New York in 2000 with two small children.

The book's title refers to an entrance to Central Park and to the unexpected perspective that family life brings to the metropolis. Gopnik's longer essays (I wish they were dated) follow a chronological line over five years, punctuated by Thanksgiving. Daily life intertwines with the city's events, characters, history and, always, a bigger point. His writing is enthusiastic and nervy, his sentences sometimes a chaos of dashes and parentheses.

He starts, as any newcomer does, with the challenge of finding an apartment, which in New York is "potentially fatal, like scaling Everest". New York, of course, means Manhattan. The author can't drive, swim, sail or do anything but walk and he loves the subway, which makes him the ideal Manhattanite.

At first he sees everything with the freshness of a new arrival, the disapproval of a Parisian (New York is so dense, teachers so nice, American food so sweet) and the romance of a father preoccupied with playgrounds, doughnut shops and the earnest quest to make children fly in the school production of Peter Pan. He examines the phenomenon of the obsessive New York parent and confesses to being one.

Then, just as the family is getting settled, "that morning" happens. Gopnik doesn't name September 11, 2001, but we know. The detail of his observations, as both resident and reporter, give pieces about the terrorist attacks lasting resonance.

The first sign downtown, where he happens to be, is a flock of pigeons lifted off the ground by the concussion. In supermarkets people fill their middle-class Armageddon baskets with flavoured vinegar, cappellini and rocket. Above Houston Street life goes on with desperate normality. How do you discuss such an event with the kids?

A dusting of fear lies over the remaining two-thirds of the book - tough for a father but a dramatic gift to a writer. Yet Gopnik returns to his energetic, jokey form; Thanksgivings come round; the children learn to use words such as "miscellaneous", mourn dead goldfish and lecture their father.

My all-time favourite Gopnik piece, which ran in The New Yorker in September 2002, does appear in the book. Bumping into Mr Ravioli is the hilarious account of three-year-old Olivia's imaginary friend. The trouble with Charlie Ravioli is that he never has time for Olivia. She speaks to him on her toy mobile phone but the conversations end unsatisfactorily: "Come and play? OK. Call me. Bye." She bumps into Ravioli and occasionally hops into a taxi or grabs lunch with him. Then he has to run. Things get so bad that soon Olivia speaks only to his assistant.

Like all Gopnik's anecdotes, this one contains insights beyond itself. Olivia's language of rush and misconnection is, of course, learnt from her parents. All New Yorkers are overcommitted. Even worse, in a later essay Ravioli marries and Olivia tells her mother the young wife has died "of a disease called Bitterosity". As Gopnik ruminates, all New Yorkers are at risk of Bitterosity.

The cute-kid stories veer towards overdose but don't crash because Gopnik's self-deprecating humour and his children's strong individuality cut through the charm. Plenty of chapters are not about children at all, especially the more journalistic pieces on subjects such as farmers' markets, feral parakeets, jazz music, the demise of department stores and the sanitising of Times Square.

But the personal essays have the most power. Man Goes To See Doctor begins as an account of Gopnik's failed five years in psychoanalysis and becomes a moving portrait of the analyst, a Freudian dinosaur who responds to his patient's tearful confidences with non sequiturs about Woody Allen, German Expressionists and where to eat in Venice.

This piece reminded me of my reservation about Gopnik. He was in therapy for "the usual mixture of hurt feelings, confusion, and incomprehension that comes to early-arriving writers when the thirties hit". Excuse me? I guessed that his crisis was at least partly brought on by Renata Adler, whose 1999 book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker made a devastating attack on Gopnik's narcissistic ambition of the mid-1980s.

Robert Hughes, he bragged privately to Adler, was going to recommend him as Time's art critic if Hughes moved to The New Yorker. Or should he take the art critic's job at The New York Times? Neither came to pass.

Any writer's collected work shows up tics of writing and personality. Cumulative Gopnik is a little too self-absorbed and showy, with traces of the bumptious younger man. But he's a fine writer, a humanising cultural critic, who once again swept me up in his passions. If you want to understand the psyche of 21st-century New York, there's probably no better guide.

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York
By Adam Gopnik
Quercus, 318pp, $29.95

What a great talent: on stage he's personable and very entertaining. Along with that he has an impressive voice as well as songs and lyrics for all ages, including those 50 plus like myself. It was a great show and I'm sure he won more fans on the evening, myself included.Ross Powell, Bella Vista